National Institutes of Health Scrubs References to Climate Change From Its Website

By Eleanor Sheehan  |  August 24, 2017 | 11:57pm
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There is no group of individuals more determined to deny and erase climate science than President Trump’s administration. Denial, is perhaps in an insufficient description of their commitment; willful ignorance is more apt. Within his first week in office, interior department websites were wiped of references to climate change. In the months since Trump’s inauguration .gov sites mentioning climate science have been edited or deleted in swift succession.

On Wednesday, The Guardian noted that The National Institutes of Health erased several page titles and headings pertaining to climate change between June 28 and July 6. The NIH is managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

From The Guardian:

The references were altered on pages belonging to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH’s division dedicated to the study of the environment and its effects on human health. NIEHS also removed links to an educational factsheet from two separate pages, and a page dedicated to explaining the environmental impacts of climate change.

What makes the NIH’s censorship of climate change references so troubling, however, is the federal agency’s influence on global health. It’s research arm, the Intramural Research Program, is the largest clinical research hospital in the world.

The slightly relieving news is that climate change wasn’t completely censored. Only explicit, prominent text referring to climate change (like headings and subheadings) were erased from the NIH’s website. As noted by The Guardian and confirmed by the internet archive Wayback Machine, most of the body text that refers to climate change remains.

Trump and his cabinet of oil-sucking overlords can delete all mention of climate change from government websites, but, try as they might, they can’t delete climate change. Because it’s fucking happening!!!

 
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